discernment and delight

a subterranean flow: Jeremiah 33–35

When the Bible traffics in unconditional promises and everlasting guarantees, the modern reader easily loses the thread. This is in part because our view of history is less dramatic than that assumed by large portions of the biblical narrative.

We read such promise as verbal guarantee of an uninterrupted status quo. On the contrary, the narrative itself posits a dilemma that Yahweh cannot or will not leave unresolved. Its point of reference is not the each-minute-of-all-minutes status of a promise, but rather the final outcome of history or of some large segment of history. Yahweh is presumed to rule sovereignly over the story and to promise that a certain outcome will stand. It is understood that interruption and hiatus will from time to time be the experience of the people, a matter that creates both tension and expectation.

Take, for example, what is sometimes called the Davidic covenant. In Jeremiah, it is expressed in this way:

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The LORD is our righteousness.” For thus says the LORD: David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, and the levitical priests shall never lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings, to make grain offerings, and to make sacrifices for all time.

The context is rich with the language of loss and of covenant. Israel/Judah is in the bereavement process. The Babylonian horde is sytematically dismantling the commonwealth, while Jeremiah—no comfort in such times—continues to proclaim that the dismantling of all that Yahweh had woven into communal life will be complete. As this narrative flow of loss works its violent course towards destruction and exile, the language of covenant emerges not so much to cushion its impact as to frame it with penultimacy.

Yahweh will once again do a number of things, against all odds and contrary to historical precedence, when the Babylonian fury that he himself has brought to Jerusalem’s gates has emptied itself of its poison. Here the Davidic covenant is invoked, a promise that ‘David shall never fail to have a son ruling upon his throne’. It is patently obvious that ‘never’ cannot mean ‘at no time’. Rather, Yahweh commits himself to the fulfillment of an antecedent promise in a manner that only a truly sovereign deity could risk. ‘David’, we are led to understand, will wait some time before a ruling son of his lineage recurs. Israel is provoked to wait expectantly with its metaphorized, once-and-future king, wondering just what kind of David will appear, when, under what circumstances, and with what consequence.

Biblical hope emerges under such conditions, to say nothing of nascent messianism.

The closest thing to an Israelite creed takes shape in just such narrative contexts of loss, covenant, and—now—expectant hope. We listen in to yet a further covenantal guarantee:

And this city shall be to me a name of joy, a praise and a glory before all the nations of the earth who shall hear of all the good that I do for them; they shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for it. Thus says the LORD: In this place of which you say, “It is a waste without human beings or animals,” in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem that are desolate, without inhabitants, human or animal, there shall once more be heard, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voices of those who sing, as they bring thank offerings to the house of the LORD:
“Give thanks to the LORD of hosts,
for the LORD is good,
for his steadfast love endures forever!”
For I will restore the fortunes of the land as at first, says the LORD.

Once more, to naively assume that Yahweh here promises a sustained status quo of some kind is misleading and makes nonsense of text and context. Rather, Yahweh is the guarantor that laughter shall at some future and consummate time again be heard in Jerusalem’s streets. It can be no other way, for Yahweh—here, the quasi-credal affirmation—is good.

The statement absorbs a formidable freight of meaning when it claims Yahweh’s goodness. Not least, the creative generosity of the creation narratives flavors the text, for the goodness and indeed the very good-ness of Yahweh’s handiwork is there taken to be a mirror held up to his own splendor.

The text explicates what it means by this foundational claim. To be good, at least for this writer, means that Yahweh’s faithful love will never exhaust itself.

One does well to pause over this statement, to consider the reason why it has come to be insisted upon in poetic and sung confession. Quite clearly, Israel affirms this because it does not always see this. It is a semi-liturgical leap of faith, a believing in the light what is quite impossible to make out in the darkness.

It reckons with the subterranean flow of Yahweh’s love, at least as humans and human society experience this. Powerful rivers sometimes take an underground course and are for all practical purposes invisible, even functionally non-existent. Exile, for Israel, is a bit like that. Kingless-ness is hardly a self-evident manifestation of Yahweh’s affection, to say nothing of the rupture of sacrificial rhythm, the loss of life and home, the national disinterment that Jeremiah urged his compatriots to hunker down and endure.

Yet biblical faith claims that such bereavement is penultimate. It does not define how reality will be. It is no token of life as we shall know it.

Loss and darkness are not potent enough to undertake the task of defining those important matters.

Only Yahweh-love has that capacity. Painfully, it sometimes runs deep beneath the earth.

Yet it does not, shall not, perhaps even cannot stay down there. Singers above raise their mnemonic voices, wait expectantly, peer into the darkness, wondering among themselves who will see it first.

Scholarship on the prophets moved with particular force in the second half of the twentieth century from a view of these figures as Romantic individualists to one that took seriously their placement within a matrix of Israelite traditions.

One consequence of this shift was the discernment of liturgical traditions in that latter portion of Isaiah where the prophetic voice is directed towards the exiles in Babylon. There appears to be a taking up of lament psalms that were actually sung or recited in exile, some of which overlap or are even identical with the laments in our canonical psaltery.

I was reminded of this while reading the ‘valley of dry bones’ vision in Ezekiel 37. Yahweh reports to the prophet some interesting words of the exilic community:

“Then (Yahweh) said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ ”

It seems to me that the text is likely quoting a real articulation of national despondency rather than a wordless sentiment. Obviously, this needs to be bolstered where possible by reference to actual exemplars of lament that employs these words.

So, yes, I do see a connection between what is going on in despair-to-hope and judgment-to-restoration texts in the prophets and what we find in the psalms of the righteous sufferer (or, as you so exotically style them, the ‘pslams of the righteous sufferer’).